spirits...are you listening?

It may look as if we're having a seance to gain help from the other side in getting a triple-word score. Actually this is us doing our Earth Hour bit from eight till nine last night, turning off all the electrics. I believe one of the candles we scrambled from the back of the cupboard was beeswax, but the rest I can guarantee were purest paraffin wax, so I'm not quite convinced we did anything very worthwhile. Still. Scrabble by candlelight. You can't beat that.

You can't see it over my shoulder but I have the beginnings of two sleeves in hand (and despite the fact that I was knitting as well as Scrabble-ing and therefore concentrating at less than full power, I still won. Mum, to my left, has head in hands as she was scuppered by getting one-point letters for the whole game). I'm using a nice cotton yarn but it's as twisty as anything and it's driving me nuts. Every single ball has twizzled itself into a hopeless tangle as I use it and I end up huffing and puffing and getting cross. Since I now have both sleeves on the go at the same time, it's an excellent opportunity for the two yarns to twizzle not only on their own but also for the individual twizzles to twizzle together, which has really not added to my serenity.

Just as I was this time last year, I am desperately trying to finish a garment for my mum before we depart for Canada, because I really don't want to be carting it along with me and then mailing it back when it's done. That would truly be a carbon footprint too big for any cardigan.

Oh, and we lost the Boat Race. I don't need to talk about it. Thanks.

rule of three

Today's knitting is modelled by Three Things England Does Best. A floor of red quarry tiles; milk bottles from the doorstep (silver top for full-cream; red and silver stripes for semi-skimmed); and the Egremont russet.

Although "Egremont" sounds a bit French, it's not; this is a Victorian-era English apple that I devour in great quantities every time I come back. It has quite a short season so sometimes I miss out, but it seems some are still lingering in the shops at the moment. They go a bit woolly if you keep them for too long, but a fresh one can't be beaten.

The knitting doesn't look like much at the moment, but it's going to be a cardigan.

As for these socks, it's amazing what you can do with a 27-hour plane ride.

What? Oh, you spotted it. Yes, all right, they are socks. I know I'm supposed to be over socks. But they're pure 100% New Zealand wool. As such they are a bit itchy, so I hope they're big enough for their future owner to wear over other socks. I love this pattern (it's the twisty cable one from before, the possum socks) but it's kind of piddly and small for what's supposed to be big honking men's socks.

The academic gown is in celebration of my role this week as chauffeuse to Emerita Professor My Mum. The socks are being completed in the halls of learning.

call for entries

I'd like to announce my entry for the Most English Saturday Afternoon Competition 2008.

Drove to a small English market town, clocking the traffic jam back in the other direction on the main road and making a mental note to return via small villages with names such as Ashby-de-la-Zouch and Barton-in-the-Beans. Entered car park and drove around for a minimum of 25 minutes looking for a space. Wandered through market street with people shouting "potatoes eighty pence a pound" rubbing shoulders with stalls selling knockoff perfumes and clothing labels. Stopped in a cafe and ordered tea and cake. Gestated a child while waiting for refreshment to arrive. Remortgaged house to pay for refreshment. Returned to car, coming across a real live group of morris dancers morris dancing (while carrying beer).

I think the clincher for my entry is actually knowing the morris dancers personally. It could only have been more English if someone had been filming a BBC adaptation of the Pickwick Papers in the town hall square.

Other entries this year include the entire Tottenham Hotspurs football team performing a pantomime on a chilly East Coast esplanade while eating fish and chips with mushy peas, and Dame Judi Dench singing Land of Hope and Glory as she serves lemon fingers at a Women's Institute tea to raise funds for the Chelsea Pensioners. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I'm in with a good chance.

writer's cramp

If England does one thing well, it’s ecclesiastical architecture. This has got to make the most die-hard heathen want to break into a triumphant chorus of “Hold the fort! For I am coming/ Jesus signals still…” (And then shuffle his or her feet in embarrassment for the outburst, because we are English after all, and anyway we don't know the rest of the hymn).

Most of England oozes centuries of history, but Lincoln has to be just about the ooziest. Cathedral, castle, Edwardian terraces, industrial revolution terraces, mills, Victoriana, Roman mosaics, medieval guildhalls, Magna Carta and all. It's like Historical Pic-n-Mix. The Cathedral’s library dates from 1422 – it still has the original roof and a good proportion of the original (extra comfy) furniture. The reading desks have bars across the top, to which the books could be chained to stop anyone wandering off with them. Of the original 109 chained books there remain 88. There is also a considerable collection of several thousand sort of misc-ish volumes shelved – yes, really – by size. Little ones at the top and big ones at the bottom. The cataloguing system is brilliant – if a book is on the third shelf up and twelve books in, its catalogue number is 3.12. Foolproof. I will be implementing it into the bookselling world post-haste.

Magna Carta is all very well; I mean, it does form the basis of almost every other constitution that exists on the planet and everything, but. The original document was little more than the minutes to a meeting of moneyed thugs who, if King John didn’t agree to their demands, probably wouldn’t have let him get out of Runymede alive. The Pope annulled it more or less right away when King John went to him boohooing that the big mean barons bullied him and it wasn’t really fair (especially as they added a bunch of clauses after he’d gone, one of which I’m pretty sure said “and I’m a big idiot and I smell, signed King John”). It was only reinstated a couple of centuries later, with revisions that made it almost unrecognisable from the original agreement. And it was four hundred years before it was actually meaningful to any other human being in England except for wealthy landowners. And, let’s face it, it has never been meaningful to women, who were effectively legal children up until the 1970s.

But it is very, very old. It has 3500 words, written in ink on vellum. And someone had to write it all out by hand forty-one times – can you imagine? It’s the mother of all after-school detentions: “for pratting about in my class this afternoon, Luke, you will write out Magna Carta forty one times.” “Aww, miss….”